You swipe. They clean. They deliver. So goes the promotional promise of the newest startup in town. Laundrapp, currently operating in London, Birmingham and Edinburgh, offers a “smarter, simpler way to do your washing”.
Michael Spencer, who has been described as London’s wealthiest self-made man, has just invested more than £2m in the company. He said: “I wish it had existed when I was a young broker. It would have made my life so much easier.” But if the app catches on the way that Uber has for taxis, it could spell ruin for the launderettes of the land. And in supposedly making our lives easier, so much will be lost.
In this age of internet-induced loneliness, we need to protect the spaces that encourage rather than erode chance encounters. The launderette is one of a resistant group of spaces that permits people to be alone together and which encourages interaction in the most sociable, and functional, of ways.
When they first opened in Britain, in 1949, launderettes were known as “gossip shops for lazy people”. Gossip because you would be exposing your dirty laundry to anyone who cared to look. Lazy because this was long before the average household could afford an automatic washing machine and doing the laundry meant boiling, scrubbing, rinsing and mangling before hanging out to dry. The launderette had other advantages; Leeds Infirmary used to hold a weekly “mangle clinic” because of the regularity with which children lost fingers in mangles.
The launderette of today is still an eavesdropping arena, a space made for the cosy exposure of stains, holes, news and views (and still a space where you are unlikely to lose a finger). A little exposure is no bad thing. Nor is a little voyeurism. We should be interested in what our neighbour has been up to, we should care about what happens outside of our immediate social circle. By doing “private” things in public, people stake their claim to that space; by taking part in common and collective activities, that space becomes “public” in a meaningful way.
My local launderette functions as a lending library and a community noticeboard. Countless others are used by elderly customers who choose to frequent them even though they probably have washing machines. Essential for people without the space, money or permanence to have the facilities to wash at home, launderettes have a function that exceeds their purpose – they are much more than the sum of their parts.
I am uncomfortable with the ideology behind Laundrapp, which seems to say that cleaning is dirty, and that time spent cleaning is wasted. As long as you can find someone else to waste this time for you, you’re doing all right. For me, the pleasures of the launderette go beyond social interaction – they also include the delinquent pleasure of wasting time, perhaps reading a book, while you wait, not to mention the satisfaction of the wash itself.
The launderette is a place that has resisted the ever-encroaching commodification and privatisation of public space so far. A country without launderettes would be intolerable. It will have succumbed to the cult of frictionless living.
If it comes to it, I will join with the nation’s launderette attendants, the unsung Dot Cottons of our isles, waving banners made from freshly cleaned sheets and lines of lost socks, scattering fabric softener in our wake, taking to the streets to proclaim: “Long live the launderette!”
